Man Breaks Into Canadian Prime Minister’s Home

The Canadian prime minister’s wife came face to face early Sunday with an intruder standing at their bedroom door with an open jackknife.

Jean Chretien said that he and his wife, Aline, locked themselves in their room until the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived minutes later and arrested the man. Neither was injured.

Chretien told reporters that his wife woke up about 2:45 a.m. when she heard a noise. Police said the man broke into the prime minister’s official residence by smashing a window with a rock.

“She got up and she saw a person in front of her, and she closed back the door very rapidly, came back to the room and locked the other door,” Chretien said at the airport before leaving for Israel to attend the funeral of slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Chretien said the sound of the door closing awakened him.

“She called the police right away, and I could not believe what she was telling me. . . . And in six or 10 minutes, I don’t know, the RCMP came on the second floor and arrested a man who had a jackknife, open, right at the door of our room,” he said.

Although Chretien said his wife called police, the RCMP said uniformed Mounties on duty on the grounds of the official residence responded to an alarm and took a man into custody.

The prime minister’s house sits atop a cliff overlooking the Ottawa River and is surrounded by a wall made of stone and wrought iron. There was no indication how the man got onto the grounds.